The internet has been... intermittent... all week, perhaps due to the temperature... I was standing on the porch on Friday morning getting ready to go to work and a truck pulled up. It was two of the folks who work at the health centre, and they yelled "get in!" and when I did the driver said to me, "It's -49 this morning, too cold to walk".

So anyway. I had a very different week, I did about four different jobs all over the hospital: filing charts and immunization cards; reception for the nursing station; assistant to the director (this was fun, I'm researching oxygen concentrators and other supplies); transcribing translated documents. Two women from the Arctic College had made handwritten translations of various forms into Innuinaqtun, and I had to make the Innu versions look like the English versions. Which is more difficult than it sounds, as the words are really long and full of Q's. At one point one of the translators was looking over my shoulder as I typed, and I typed "kanok" because that's what the word looked like, and she said "No, that's a 'U', we don't use 'O'" and I looked through all the other stuff I'd already typed and saw that yes, indeed, there were no 'O's. But it's really tedious to proofread it myself, because I don't know how to spell a single word. This is partly because rather than having articles and adjectives, each root word gets added onto (as if they weren't long enough to start with). Our town is called Iqaluktutiaq, and someone who lives here is called Iqaluktutiaqmi, and the whole population is Iqaluktiaqmiut, for instance... Some of the documents were a rabies advisory, someone's puppies have rabies and the health director wanted a flyer to put in people's mailboxes.

So it was a fun week, although I did miss Miguel, who was in Rankin Inlet all week. When I left work on Friday I went to the bank and the store, to get some supplies and a chocolate cake for dessert. I was cutting through the school field, and it occurred to me that I was alone in the Arctic with the children, and yet I'd coped fine all week. We had the Cubs Christmas party on Tuesday, and I ran the craft table, taught thirty little kids how to make God's Eyes. You know, the popsicle sticks with the wool artfully woven around to make a square around a cross. Everyone seems to have made them at some summer camp in the course of their lives.

My brother Roy and his new wife are going on their honeymoon to Peru shortly. I told Roy I wanted to come, but he laughed and said, "I can't see that really fitting the definition of a honeymoon: Oh, by the way, my sister's coming with us." Personally I think it's only fair, he was at the hospital when Kirsten, my first child, was born, helped me take her home in a taxi and everyone thought he was the father... Ok, so maybe that's a bit of a weak argument. I just wanna go to Peru.

Some cool words:

Schadenfreude: glee at another's misfortune
Vituperative: given to speaking abusively, berating, reviling
Hebetude: the quality or condition of being dull or lethargic